From Saturday to Tuesday, I stayed with my mother in New York City, where she lives. (You can read her blog here.) Before heading up there, I had spent a few hours researching vintage boutiques, record stores, and thrift shops that I might want to visit while in the city. Let me tell you, there are so many of these stores in NYC, it feels overwhelming if you want to narrow it down to a doable number, and there wasn’t any good reliable list of vintage/thrift stores to fall back on. Anywho, one click led to another and I ended up finding a bunch of stores with addresses on Bleecker Street, so I decided to make it easy on everyone with me and just try and shop on and around that street. I didn’t get to every store I had on my list but I did get to see quite a bit. Here is what I did.
1. Bleecker Bob’s Golden Oldies Record Shop
Address:118 West 3rd St, New York, NY 10012 (Greenwich Village)
Hours: Sun-Thur 11-1am Fri-Sat 11-3am (Crazy weird hours, right?)
I did not get a shot of the exterior of the store, but this is a good one. The prices were reasonable and based on rarity and condition. The place was not picked over, as is the case with a lot of record shops. The majority of the records are organized alphabetically/by genre, so you didn’t have to dig for all eternity if you had something particular in mind. I spent more than I normally do on records, but I was on vacation, so I got crazy. I bought The Ramones: End of the Century ($24), Kraftwerk: The Man Machine ($13), and a Siouxsie and the Banshees single Cities in Dust ($10). These are bands that I have never found on vinyl in any of my travels, and they are three of my favorite bands, so it was worth the money. Sadly, the Ramones album skips (not sure if it is my record player or what, because I can’t see a scratch).
Final thoughts: Go there!
Thrifty Cent 